What you need to know about conveyancing - a guide for the prospective purchaser of real property
Posted 5 years ago
A succinct & practical timeline of The Conveyancing Process to help you through your purchase of Real Property.
If you’re a prospective purchaser of property and you’ve followed the guidance in the previous articles, it’s time to learn the key steps involved within the Conveyancing Process. The best way to limit possible complications, is to be informed of each phase of your property purchase.
Conveyancing may be completed by a conveyancer or a solicitor. It is our recommendation that you use a solicitor in all of these stages, to avoid hidden risks that can present themselves at the time of, and subsequent to the purchase of a property.
There are 7 main stages in the conveyancing timeline:
Step 1
Your Solicitor has helped you answer the key questions and negotiated suitable contract terms for the property you intend to purchase. At this stage, you should have satisfied yourself that the property is what you want and that you are able to buy it on the terms of the contract.
See our past two blogs titled “6 Things you should do as a prospective purchaser of Real Property” and “How to reveal your Prospective Property is what you actually want” for more information about this step.
Step 2
If you are borrowing money to fund the purchase price, the bank has approved your loan application following valuation of the Property and issued a formal Loan Approval.
Step 3
Contract exchange. You sign the contract and pay the deposit. The date that the exchange of Contract occurs is known as Contract Date.
Step 4
At 5:00pm, five business days from exchange, the Contract becomes unconditional.
It is now binding on you.
* This may be earlier if you have obtained an s66w certificate from your solicitor waiving your cooling off rights. While waiving these rights has obvious risks (especially without legal advice from your solicitor in step 1 of this process), vendors may ask for the provision of a s66W certificate as an additional bargaining tool, in the event where there are numerous other potential buyers and the parties want to lock in the contract.
Step 5
Your solicitor undertakes additional searches, issues requisitions on title and prepares for settlement by preparing the settlement adjustment figures. This is where the council rates such as land tax and water are taken into consideration and adjusted for, so that the vendor and purchaser each pay their share.
Step 6
The bank notifies your solicitor that funds are available for settlement and your solicitor books in the settlement to finalise the purchase of the property.
Step 7
The Settlement Date. This usually falls 42 days after the Contract Date. This is when you have to pay the balance of the purchase price subject to any adjustments.
In NSW, Settlement now takes place electronically via the PEXA platform, and once completed, ownership of the Property transfers into your name.
At Schmidt-Liermann, we offer unparalleled experience in online settlement services through PEXA.
Online settlement via PEXA versus a manual settlement has a number of benefits to the purchaser. These include:
- greater security;
- greater certainty of clear title;
- greater certainty of successful settlement;
- less paperwork;
- more efficiency; and
- lodgement gap cover. PEXA takes responsibility and therefore nulls the risk of any impact to registration between settlement and lodgement. This cover was not available without extra cost to the purchaser in manual transactions.
*Note this article does not represent legal advice and prospective purchasers should obtain legal advice as early as possible and always before entering into a contract for sale.
Get advice early! We are here to help – If you have a question about anything in this article, call us on 02 8095 7977, email us at [E-Mail via form] or DM our facebook or Instagram page and we will be more than happy to answer your questions.